This is the time of year when The Choice blog reaches out to more than 100 colleges across a broad spectrum — public and private, elite and (perhaps) more welcoming — to sketch a portrait of this year’s full application cycle, including early and regular submissions.

The more than 40 colleges and universities that have thus far responded to our queries (as depicted in the running tally above) are hardly a representative sample of the nation’s more than 2,000 four-year institutions of higher education. So we will save you the trouble of telling us the list isn’t comprehensive.

And yet, to those students who applied to these and other universities this year, perhaps these preliminary statistics begin to provide a bit of a rough sense of the relative dimensions of the pools in which you’ve chosen to dive — if not necessarily definitive reasons why one particular college got hot, and another cooled down. And yet, the institutions themselves, at least, have their theories, and in some cases we do, too.

At the University of California, Berkeley, applications are up nearly 17 percent over a year ago — a “notable increase” that was mirrored at other campuses in the U.C. system, says Janet Gilmore, a Berkeley spokeswoman. The relatively low cost of a public education in California, even with steep, state-mandated hikes in tuition in recent years, is likely a factor. (And yet, the university did not announce until after its Nov. 30 application deadline that it would, as my Times colleague Jennifer Medina wrote at the time, “offer far more financial aid to middle-class students starting next fall, with families earning up to $140,000 a year expected to contribute no more than 15 percent of their annual income.”)

Cost also appeared to be on the minds of applicants to Babson College in Boston, where applications are up more than 8 percent over a year ago. “Families are looking more at the aspect of ‘value,’ and not solely at the sticker price,” Grant M. Gosselin, dean of undergraduate admissions, wrote in an e-mail. “Families are asking more questions about four-year graduation rates (as opposed to five- and six-year rates), employment placement rates upon graduation, and long-term economic potential.”

Over the holidays, readers flooded The Choice’s mailbox with thoughtful comments and observations, including on the initial student postings to our first-person “Envelope, Please” series.

In response to Robert Clagett’s essay on gap years, some of you also weighed in on the value of taking time off before college. Many were supportive of taking a break, though several wondered about the financial feasibility of doing so.

As one commenter wrote in response to Mr. Clagett’s advocacy of taking a year off between high school and college:

Great advice in theory, but for some families, like ours, the financial aid consequences can be prohibitive. Our younger son probably would have benefited from a gap year, but when we ran the financial aid calculators, we discovered that it would end up reducing his older brother’s financial aid by about $20,000 and reduce his own financial aid in a few years by about $25,000.

Thursday night on The Choice blog’s Facebook page — facebook.com/nytimesthechoice — we’ll host our final, hourlong admissions Q. and A. of the week (and the year). And we’d like the main (but by no means only) theme to be this one: What college admissions homework might high-school juniors (and their parents) assign themselves over the holiday break, and what should their priorities be right after New Year’s?

We know you may have last-minute holiday shopping, but we’ve got a terrific guest expert lined up for this exchange: Jennifer Christensen, co-director of college counseling at Marin Academy in San Rafael, Calif. Ms. Christensen is a former admissions officer herself, including at Claremont McKenna College (where she was director of admission) and at Sarah Lawrence.

To get the ball rolling early, you can start posting your questions here on this post, right now, by using the comment box below. (Please note, you will have to scroll down to the bottom of this post to find that box.) Ms. Christensen will be answering as many of these questions as possible, in real time, tonight (from 8 to 9 p.m. Eastern time) on the Choice Facebook page. At that time, you’ll be able to ask additional questions, and follow-up questions. To those readers who are seniors: feel free to lob in questions related to the end game of the admissions process.

As the (virtual) ink dries on this year’s early admissions process at dozens of selective private colleges and public universities, some trends are beginning to come into focus.

For one thing, as in years past, nearly half the seats in the next freshman class are spoken for at some marquee colleges with binding early-decision programs, according to a spot survey conducted in recent days by The Choice. For example, at the University of Pennsylvania, 47 percent of the next freshman class is set; at Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Middlebury, that figure is 45 percent; at Dartmouth, 42 percent.

Another trend that has also held: the acceptance rate in the early admission round is often markedly higher than in the main round (although the colleges will often say that is because the early pool is often more qualified.) Nonetheless, it is worth noting that Harvard reports that it offered admission to 18 percent of those who applied this fall under its new, nonbinding early action program, compared to an overall admission rate of 6 percent for the current freshman class; Princeton offered acceptance to 21 percent of its early applicants to its new nonbinding program, compared to 8 percent overall last year; and Stanford extended acceptance offers to nearly 13 percent in its nonbinding early program, compared to 7 percent overall last year.

One attends a Minnesota public high school and dreams of becoming a veterinarian. But she won’t be studying at Cornell University or the University of California, Davis, at least as an undergraduate. She crossed those schools off earlier rough drafts of her college wish list at least partly because, she says, her parents have agreed to pay only the equivalent of in-state tuition at a Minnesota public university.

Another is an aspiring screenwriter who attends Brooklyn Technical High School in New York City and whose college list doesn’t include “heavy-hitting titles such as Harvard, Yale and Brown,” because his parents have given him a clear mantra: “Forget privates, let’s talk SUNY.”

Yet another is a high school senior in Long Beach, Calif., who is toggling between practicality and dreaming big — he is applying to four University of California campuses, as well as Harvard, Princeton and Columbia — while “constantly thinking” about the “tuition spikes” throughout the U.C. system this year, the ever-increasing cost of private colleges and how much financial aid he might reasonably receive.

These three students — Abigail Hansen, Kyu Nakama and Jason Solis — are among eight high school seniors from around the country who will be blogging their college search processes on The Choice blog, beginning today and continuing through the end of the school year. They will be doing so under the rubric of a series called “The Envelope, Please,” which we’ve also published in years past. (Last year, we detoured from that format and followed six seniors at Cherry Creek High in Denver.)

As in years past, this year’s roster of student bloggers has been whittled from the recommendations of college counselors at various high schools, public and private. In the end, we selected two bloggers each from four high schools: Brooklyn Tech, Minnetonka High, Long Beach Polytechnic High and Marist School, in Atlanta.

While each student has a unique story, a majority told us that they share a high anxiety about paying for college, and that their final decisions will largely be a function of money. That struck us on The Choice as perhaps the story of this year’s admissions process, and we are grateful that these young people (all writing using their real names) have provided us as readers a virtual seat at their kitchen tables as they sort out such matters in the coming weeks and months.

Beginning today, and continuing through Friday, we’ll be publishing the introductory posts of two of our student bloggers each day. Leading off are Ms. Hansen, of Minnetonka High School, and Mr. Nakama of Brooklyn Tech. Later this week you’ll meet Ms. Hansen’s classmate Rachel Yang; Cassandra Dagostino, Mr. Nakama’s classmate at Brooklyn Tech; Mr. Solis and his Long Beach Poly classmate Autumn Chubbs, and Eric Eichelberger and Clare Tiarsmith of Marist Academy.

We look forward to getting to know them along with you, right up until the moment that they not only receive their final envelopes — fat or thin, usually digitally — and then send back their responses to the colleges via envelopes of their own.

“Great news! We will begin releasing EA decisions late this afternoon. Please be patient – because of a number of factors, decisions will be released over the course of a few days. We will keep our promise that they will all be out by Dec. 23.”

Students commented on the news, expressing frustration at the staggered release. Nick Rinehart, a student at Rochester High School in Rochester Hills, Mich., wrote: “AHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Just send it already!” while Jenny Mayer, a student at Great Neck South Senior High School on Long Island, sought clarification and tighter parameters: “what is late afternoon?!” she wrote.

Erica Sanders, managing director of undergraduate admissions at Michigan, cited “technical I.T. requirements” as the reason for the expanded time frame.

For early applicants to Lehigh University, there is a similarly extended period of anticipation this year, as Lehigh has chosen not to release application decisions online because of technical troubles with its Web notification system. Read more…

At a time when the College Board is already under scrutiny, as in the SAT testing fraud investigation on Long Island, the organization that oversees the high-stakes college entrance exam has inadvertently raised students’ anxiety on another front.

This week, an untold number of counselors and students received an e-mail from the College Board soliciting their credit card information. The message, which carried a subject line of “The College Board – Past Due Invoice,” read:

Our records indicate a past due balance on your account. This is often the result of a declined credit card payment or failure to submit the correct amount with your registration. It is important that you pay this outstanding balance quickly to avoid having your SAT scores placed on hold.

While it wasn’t spam, it did turn out to have been sent in error. The e-mail was followed, some 10 hours later, by an apology and retraction from the same College Board e-mail address. The note was headlined “PLEASE DISREGARD EARLIER MESSAGE” and read: Read more…

Are you a high school senior brimming with questions about those college applications you’re trying desperately to finish? The Choice blog would like to offer you some help — and some answers — in a series of live chats.

Next week, for three consecutive nights, three veteran college counselors from prestigious private high schools will be live-chatting with readers of The Choice on Facebook. They will try to answer your final application questions as the Jan. 1 deadline nears for most applications.

The first night’s chat will take place Tuesday, Dec. 20, on The New York Times’s main Facebook page: facebook.com/nytimes. The two chats thereafter will be staged at The Choice blog’s Facebook page: facebook.com/nytimesthechoice. All of the exchanges will be from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern time, and the counselors will answer questions in real time.

Kicking off the series on Tuesday will be Marie Bigham, director of college counseling at the Greenhill School in Addison, Tex. Wednesday’s guest is Jeff Durso-Finley, director of college counseling at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, N.J. And on Thursday, Jennifer Wong Christensen, co-director of college counseling at Marin Academy in San Rafael, Calif., will conclude the series.

We invite applicants who might be finishing their applications — or seeking to make sense of their early application news — to log on and draw on the expertise of these three counselors. Each is a member of the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools, a membership organization of more than 300 schools represented by 700 counselors.

For those who wish to get an early jump on these Q&A’s, you can start posting your questions now, using the comment box below. The counselors will try to get to at least some of the early questions each night.

Under the new program, which is projected to cost Berkeley around $12 million each year, families earning up to $140,000 will be expected to contribute no more than 15 percent of their annual income to financing a student’s education.

As Ms. Medina noted, Berkeley’s decision is a landmark one:

While several elite private universities — including the Ivy League triumvirate of Harvard, Princeton and Yale — offer similar programs for families with incomes up to $200,000, experts said that Berkeley was the first public university to do so. For the most part, public colleges have focused on merit scholarships to lure top students and aid for the poorest families to ensure access, but many now worry that approach has left out a wide group of families.

She additionally outlined the mechanics of the program, highlighting a few important asterisks: Read more…

Forty percent of people ages 25 to 34 in the United States have college degrees, putting the nation in 12th place among developed countries. President Obama has set an ambitious goal of catapulting the country to first place by 2025, and the College Board, separately, has quantified a complementary goal: to increase the percentage of young adults with degrees from 40 percent to 55 percent by 2025.

But a report released on Wednesday by the College Board concluded that, if growth in degree completion continues at the same rate, the country will fail to meet that challenge.

From 2000 to 2009, the report noted, the percentage of adults with associate degrees or higher increased by just 3 percent. If that pace holds steady, by 2025 the United States will fall nine percentage points below the president’s goal, with 46 percent of adults holding college degrees.

Several states, the College Board reported, are better positioned than others to meet the national goal. Massachusetts, for instance, has the highest rate of degree completion, at 53.7 percent. Close behind are North Dakota (50.5 percent), Minnesota (49.4 percent), New York (49.2 percent) and New Jersey (46.2 percent). Only the District of Columbia has already met the 55 percent mark.

On the lower half of the spectrum, less than 30 percent of young adults in Arkansas, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico and West Virginia have an associate degree or higher, the College Board reports.

The report also highlighted differences in completion rates by race, noting that while around 40 percent of all young Americans hold college degrees, nearly 70 percent of Asian-Americans do, compared with 49 percent of white young adults, 19 percent of Hispanic young adults and 29 percent of African-American young adults.

To accelerate college attendance and completion, the report recommended bolstering high school counseling resources, specifically improving the average counselor-to-student ratio of 457-to-1, along with strengthening dropout prevention programs across the country.

Do readers of The Choice have reactions to the College Board’s report? What do you think of the country’s college completion agenda? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.